A change in my life has made me aware of time passing, of one’s former world slipping away, and of loss. A century ago, the First World War did that to millions. Two novels express those feelings with unusual power
At the end of June I took a taxi across New York City to JFK. A good friend accompanied me, knowing that this wasn’t the easiest of journeys; she helped me with my luggage, and with morale. We queued for an hour and a half at baggage drop; the air was hot and humid, the queue restive. I forked out $100 for being overweight (my suitcase, not me; happily they didn’t weigh me). I said goodbye to my friend with regret; I have known her 20 years and I will miss her.
*
So I am now in England, and time and change have been much on my mind.
A hitch with the flat I had been hoping to live in has seen me stay with friends and then, for a while, borrow a house from other friends; the latter have a well-stocked bookshelf. I had been meaning to read Virgina Woolf’s To the Lighthouse for 30 years but had wondered if I would find it dense and pretentious. When I moved in I saw they had a copy on their shelf. I had nothing immediate to do that day. There was now no excuse. I took a snap of the book on a table next to a glass of Sauvignon Blanc and posted it on Facebook, captioned: “I may need a glass of wine to get through this one.”
I beg to differ. This is a maddening book in some ways and no-one is obliged like it, or any book for that matter. But I didn’t need loads of wine to get through it. (I drank it anyway. But I didn’t need it.)
The book falls into two main segments, 10 years apart. The two main segments are before and after the first world war – but we know that only because one character has perished in it; Woolf mentions this only briefly, and says nothing else about the conflict. In the first, main, segment we see the Ramsays, a moderately well-to-do couple who spend their summers on Skye with their eight children and in the company of various house-guests. Ramsay is a philosopher who has, when younger, made a major contribution to metaphysics but whose reputation may be fading. Now in his early 60s, he seems to know this and needs constant reassurance and support from women, including his wife. But there is not one whit of evidence that he gives it to anyone else. And Ramsay is tactless as well as needy; the youngest child is excited that they will be taking a boat-trip to the lighthouse. Ramsay rather crushes him, and his wife, by saying brusquely that the weather will be bad and they shan’t go.
Yet it is not him but Mrs Ramsay who dominates this section, for she is far more interesting than her rather selfish husband. She has been a great beauty in her youth and is still striking, warm, affectionate and charismatic – but with a tendency to direct the lives of others.
This first segment is followed by a shorter, linking section, Time Passes, that expresses the passage of time. In it we learn of deaths and of the house, empty, losing its spirit.
In the second main segment, ten years later, Mrs Ramsay is dead and their eldest son has been killed in the war, while their eldest daughter has died in childbirth. The house has been neglected. But a few years later what is left of the family, and two of their friends, return. This time, Ramsay and the two youngest children do sail to the lighthouse. Before that, in a crucial moment, one of the house-guests withholds her emotional support from him. These two events bring a sort of closure; the children are no longer dominated by their self-centred father, and women no longer give him the reassurance he so needs but has done little to earn.
What Woolf has done is take us through the heads of the Ramsays and their guests so that we can see how the web of relationships around them works. Nowhere is this done better than in a description of a family dinner in the first section, in which the characters of the couple and their guests, their motivations and their feelings are laid bare from within, by revealing their thoughts with the stream-of-consciousness technique for which this book is so known. It all sounds rather cold. It isn’t. The changing light in the dining room as the night draws in; the lighting of the candles during the meal; their soft glow against the darkness outside – it is actually quite lyrical, and remains in one’s mind when one rejoins some of the same people 10 years later and feels their sense of loss – the loss of Mrs Ramsay, loss of their younger selves.
This reflects Woolf’s own life. She had lost her brother, her half-sister and then her father when she was still quite young. Most importantly, she had also lost her mother when she was just 13. Thus Mrs Ramsay was in fact a portrait of Woolf’s own mother, Julia Stephen, who – like Mrs Ramsay – had been a noted beauty; she had posed for the Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones and the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, amongst others. It seems she also had a tendency to organise the lives of others and was an avid matchmaker. This is Mrs Ramsay indeed, and the depiction of her is the key to the book, which turns on the effect she has on the people around her, and the way they feel about her after her passing – which Stephen did fairly suddenly, as Mrs Ramsay does in the book. This also brought family summers in Cornwall to an end (though nominally set in Skye, To the Lighthouse recalls those summers in St Ives; the lighthouse was modelled on the nearby Godrevy Lighthouse).
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| Virginia Woolf, left, and sister Vanessa in 1894, the year before the death of their mother, Julia Stephen (Photographer unknown) |
While time and loss are the main themes in the book, Woolf may also have wished to suggest that men dominate women and yet actually depend on them, suppressing their aspirations but also sucking them dry emotionally. This is seen not only in the relationship between the Ramsays but also in their guest, the artist Lily Briscoe, who is told by a fellow-guest that women can’t paint or write. Briscoe must struggle with her own lack of confidence but seems to decide in the end that it is her own feelings about her art that matter.
It may be that Woolf was saying something about herself as a woman writer. One also senses that Lily Briscoe is somewhat dazzled by Mrs Ramsay, and needs to get out from under; did Woolf feel that way about her own mother?
I also saw that Woolf was addressing a broader sense of loss, though it is not explicit; the world, and lives, lost through the First World War. So far as I know, she never said so; she doesn’t mention it as such anywhere in the book. We’re merely told that the eldest son has been killed by a shell fragment and that his death was instant along with that of 20 or 30 others. In that brief sentence Woolf may have subtly told us what To the Lighthouse is also about: not just loss, but the fact that in 1927 millions felt it. To be sure, this book expresses Woolf’s own very personal sense of loss. But the war is there.
Why do some people loathe this book?
I think I know. It isn’t pretentious, but it can be dense. That is a function of the way it is written. As a rule, a good writer will show, not tell. What is striking about To the Lighthouse is that Woolf completely breaks that rule, taking us inside the characters and unspooling their inner thoughts. A friend who lectures in the arts at a major US university, and has taught this book and others by Woolf, reminds me that this is common to many writers, especially when telling stories from multiple viewpoints. “Do we accuse Henry James, say, of telling not showing?” she asks me. It is a fair point. But Woolf does take this quite far. It works, the way breaking any rule might work provided you break it hard enough. It also makes this book a little hard, at times, to read. But it is one of the keys to its poignant nature.
Another reason may be the fact that this book was, for Woolf, autobiographical and deeply personal, and is anchored in characters that she herself knew. This may also have irritated some readers, as it can seem self-indulgent; surely a good novel should say something about broader human experience?
But I think it does; as we’ve seen, the First World War is the unspoken backdrop to this book. It isn’t just about Woolf’s own bereavements. That’s not obvious now, but to readers at the time it probably was. It’s true that Woolf does not mention the war explicitly, instead alluding to it only briefly – but that is natural; in 1927, one would not labour a point about an experience that had only just been common to everybody.
I suppose that if everyone likes a book, no-one really loves it. And when I made that Facebook post there was one dissenting voice, from my lecturer friend. The book was, she said, “exhilarating. And profoundly moving – on time, perception, loss, art. It is a book that never leaves me.” I think I at least partly agree. To the Lighthouse is not, in the end, a sterile or pretentious literary experiment. On the contrary, it is surprising for its gentle depiction of love and regret and its understanding of grief.
I did not need the brandy.
So to another book I found in the same shelf: J.L. Carr’s A Month in the Country.
I also saw that Woolf was addressing a broader sense of loss, though it is not explicit; the world, and lives, lost through the First World War. So far as I know, she never said so; she doesn’t mention it as such anywhere in the book. We’re merely told that the eldest son has been killed by a shell fragment and that his death was instant along with that of 20 or 30 others. In that brief sentence Woolf may have subtly told us what To the Lighthouse is also about: not just loss, but the fact that in 1927 millions felt it. To be sure, this book expresses Woolf’s own very personal sense of loss. But the war is there.
*
I think I know. It isn’t pretentious, but it can be dense. That is a function of the way it is written. As a rule, a good writer will show, not tell. What is striking about To the Lighthouse is that Woolf completely breaks that rule, taking us inside the characters and unspooling their inner thoughts. A friend who lectures in the arts at a major US university, and has taught this book and others by Woolf, reminds me that this is common to many writers, especially when telling stories from multiple viewpoints. “Do we accuse Henry James, say, of telling not showing?” she asks me. It is a fair point. But Woolf does take this quite far. It works, the way breaking any rule might work provided you break it hard enough. It also makes this book a little hard, at times, to read. But it is one of the keys to its poignant nature.
Another reason may be the fact that this book was, for Woolf, autobiographical and deeply personal, and is anchored in characters that she herself knew. This may also have irritated some readers, as it can seem self-indulgent; surely a good novel should say something about broader human experience?
I suppose that if everyone likes a book, no-one really loves it. And when I made that Facebook post there was one dissenting voice, from my lecturer friend. The book was, she said, “exhilarating. And profoundly moving – on time, perception, loss, art. It is a book that never leaves me.” I think I at least partly agree. To the Lighthouse is not, in the end, a sterile or pretentious literary experiment. On the contrary, it is surprising for its gentle depiction of love and regret and its understanding of grief.
I did not need the brandy.
*
So to another book I found in the same shelf: J.L. Carr’s A Month in the Country.
I had known this book was meant to be rather good and had been planning to read it for years, but would likely have gone on doing so had I not found a copy in my friend’s bookcase. I am glad I did. Carr wasn’t a well-known or fashionable writer; he spent much of his life as a teacher in Kettering and wrote books because he felt like it. They attracted little notice until he was really quite old. But this short book, written in the late 1970s when he was about 66, is a tour de force.
A Month in the Country begins on a wet day in the summer of 1920. A young man arrives in the Yorkshire village of Oxgodby to execute a commission. A wealthy parishioner has left a bequest to the church on the condition that a medieval doom-painting high on the chancel arch, long whitewashed over, is uncovered. The young man, Birkin, is the restorer. Over the summer he will reveal the painting. He will also find a sense of peace in the village, and will start to recover from the damage inflicted on him on the battlefield at Passchendaele. But he will also fall in love, and face a decision. Nearly 60 years later, he recounts that summer in Yorkshire and what it meant to him, and remembers the world of the 1920s, now vanished.
I had expected a dreamy, elegiac book, but it seemed at first that I was going to get something more realistic than that. It opens in the rain as Birkin walks down to Oxgodby soaked to the skin and gets a cool welcome from the vicar, who he knows at once he shan’t like. And yet this book is elegiac, a picture of the countryside 100 years ago and a way of life that has likely largely gone, with horses and carts hauling people to Sunday-school treats and harmoniums in the chapels. This could have been very hackneyed or contrived, or come across as cloying nostalgia. It doesn’t, because Carr’s language is simple and elegant; not one passage is over-written, so that at the end the sense of a lost world, and long-ago love, strikes one suddenly and with some force. It’s something I’ve only seen done this well once before, by J. B. Priestley in his own masterwork, Bright Day.
A Month in the Country does have a harder edge, should one wish to find it. Medieval doom paintings were intended to warn the congregation of damnation. The righteous are shown lining up to enter Heaven; sinners are seen falling into hellfire, assisted by imps and demons. I wondered if Carr intended to link the depiction of Hell in the painting, and the fact that Birkin, along with millions of other young men, had just been there. Is Carr telling us that Christian notions of Hell are somewhat idle when it’s actually a place that we create ourselves? Carr was eight in 1920, so did not fight in the First World War (though he did serve in the Second). But he would certainly have remembered the shadows the war cast in the 1920s. My father, born in 1920, did.
A Month in the Country begins on a wet day in the summer of 1920. A young man arrives in the Yorkshire village of Oxgodby to execute a commission. A wealthy parishioner has left a bequest to the church on the condition that a medieval doom-painting high on the chancel arch, long whitewashed over, is uncovered. The young man, Birkin, is the restorer. Over the summer he will reveal the painting. He will also find a sense of peace in the village, and will start to recover from the damage inflicted on him on the battlefield at Passchendaele. But he will also fall in love, and face a decision. Nearly 60 years later, he recounts that summer in Yorkshire and what it meant to him, and remembers the world of the 1920s, now vanished.
I had expected a dreamy, elegiac book, but it seemed at first that I was going to get something more realistic than that. It opens in the rain as Birkin walks down to Oxgodby soaked to the skin and gets a cool welcome from the vicar, who he knows at once he shan’t like. And yet this book is elegiac, a picture of the countryside 100 years ago and a way of life that has likely largely gone, with horses and carts hauling people to Sunday-school treats and harmoniums in the chapels. This could have been very hackneyed or contrived, or come across as cloying nostalgia. It doesn’t, because Carr’s language is simple and elegant; not one passage is over-written, so that at the end the sense of a lost world, and long-ago love, strikes one suddenly and with some force. It’s something I’ve only seen done this well once before, by J. B. Priestley in his own masterwork, Bright Day.
Meanwhile there is a hint that whoever painted the original may have died suddenly, before he could finish his work; also that one of the damned souls in his painting is clearly someone real. These two facts may be linked, but Carr leaves this to our imagination. But it doesn’t really matter whether one uncovers these layers or not, because this short, simply written and rather beautiful book has enormous impact. I can’t recommend it too highly. In fact A Month in the Country and To the Lighthouse may both be amongst the four or five best novels I have read.
Sometimes books can be a source of solace at a time of change and worry. These two were.
Sometimes books can be a source of solace at a time of change and worry. These two were.
Mike Robbins’s latest book, On the Rim of the Sea, is now
available as a paperback or ebook. More details here.
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